sauerkrautsaulFucking seriously ruining the general web in terms of looking up information.
I don’t think we can overestimate the impact this “knowledge collapse” will have yet. Thank goodness for the fediverse, not that it is immune but holy shit the rest of the internet and ALL of corporate social media sure has gone to the dumps fast hasn’t it…
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
I think it is tantamount to a mass delusion that people refuse to think about the fact that social media will tear society apart unless it is structured in at the very least a semi-decentralized federated fashion not under the control of one or two massive corporations. It feels like for my whole life I have had conversations like this with people and most often people just don’t care, they would rather be under a more convenient and more centralized authority. Regardless it is no less surreal to me than it must be to those people in denial about this that we are seeing the unavoidable consequences of refusing to understand a crisis of centralization rip our societies apart into violence and bigotry.
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
And only partly related. It’s not AI’s fault that searching “Tetris Attack” can return generic results for Tetris, and clicking “Did you mean–?” is a blank page.
No, in a morbidly fascinating way you are right, it isn’t really “AI’s fault” and it isn’t really a problem that originated with LLMs… rather somehow AI and LLM bullshit is a further outgrowth, an extension and evolution of the same mindset and process that lead to cryptocurrency and then right up to the creation of AI. Not the technology considered in abstract mind you I am specifically referring to the conceptualization and deployment of the technology within a cultural and economic context and the resulting consequences on the general public’s understanding or misunderstanding of these technologies. There is a bright clear line directly through a series of “next big things” that makes it obvious the actual specific function of technology is less important than other aspects of these bubbles and movements.
AI as a cultural construct is a solution to many important pressing questions of 20th century capitalism on how best to monetize the rather… uncapitalist tendency of computers to undermine capitalism by allowing ideas, experiences and culture to be shared endlessly. Computers devastate scarcity in the basic aspects of how they conceptualize information and this has always been the original sin of computers ever since a gay antifascist created them. AI allows wonderfully transparent search engine indexes to be obscured behind layers of AI training that filter in more and more bullshit/monetized influencing/ads into every crevice of objective reality present in the digital realm and eat it away.
While it is a strange to say, I think it is perfectly reasonable to think of AI as spiritual experience for Google executives as it brings together the two horribly amputated concepts of actual content and promoted content that fatally pre-empted endless profits and growth from search engines.